When Prophecy Fails

by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, Stanley Schachter

Overview

2009 reprint of 1956 First edition. When Prophecy Fails [1956] is a classic text in social psychology authored by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. It chronicles the experience of a UFO cult that believed the end of the world was at hand. In effect, it is a social and psychological study of a modern group that predicted the destruction of the world, and the adjustments made when the prediction failed to materialize. "The authors have done something as laudable as it is unusual for social psychologists. They espied a fleeting social movement important to a line of research they were interested in and took after it. They recruited a team of observers, joined the movement, and watched it from within under great difficulties until its crisis came and went. Their report is of interest as much for the method as for the substance."-Everett C. Hughes, The American Journal of Sociology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781578988525
Publisher:	Martino Fine Books
Publication date:	11/13/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	260
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.59(d)

About the Author

Leon Festinger (1919 - 1989) was an American social psychologist, perhaps best known for cognitive dissonance and social comparison theory. His theories and research are credited with renouncing the previously dominant behaviorist view of social psychology by demonstrating the inadequacy of stimulus-response conditioning accounts of human behavior. Festinger is also credited with advancing the use of laboratory experimentation in social psychology, although he simultaneously stressed the importance of studying real-life situations, a principle he perhaps most famously practiced when personally infiltrating a doomsday cult. He is also known in social network theory for the proximity effect (or propinquity). Festinger was the fifth most cited psychologist of the 20th century. Henry W. Riecken Jr. (1917-2012) received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1950, having studied in the Department of Social Relations, which enjoyed a well-known relationship with the Department of Psychology. A thought leader, and a follower and booster of interesting thoughts (more prescience), Riecken was the first director of the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Office of Social Sciences (later called a division) in 1959. As vice president and then president of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) from 1966 to 1971, Hank led the development of the first state-of-the-art monograph on randomized controlled trials in the United States. Riecken was a member of the first Director's Advisory Committee at the National Institutes of Health. He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Board on Medicine in 1969 (one of two social scientists) and, as a founding member, assisted in the challenging effort to create the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1971. Stanley Schachter (1922 - 1997) was an American social psychologist, who is perhaps best known for his development of the two factor theory of emotion in 1962 along with Jerome E. Singer. In his theory he states that emotions have two ingredients: physiological arousal and a cognitive label. A person's experience of an emotion stems from the mental awareness of the body's physical arousal. Schachter also studied and published a large number of works on the subjects of obesity, group dynamics, birth order and smoking. Schachter was the seventh most cited psychologist of the 20th century.